Orwell in Cuba: How 1984 Came to Be Published in Castro’s Twilight

By Frédérick Lavoie

Orwell in Cuba chronicles journalist Frédérick Lavoie’s attempts to unravel the motives behind the mysterious appearance of a new translation of George Orwell’s 1984, formerly taboo in Cuba, just ahead of the country’s twenty-fifth International Book Fair. Lavoie works to make sense of how Cubans feel about the past, present, and future of their island – and how the political regime is adapting, or not, to life in the twenty-first century. His intertwined quests give readers the unique experience of following a suspenseful trail while at the same time becoming increasingly familiar with Cubans’ relationship to the regime and their strategies for coping with the island’s often challenging living conditions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Mar 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781772012781

Frédérick Lavoie

Born in Chicoutimi in 1983, Frédérick Lavoie is a writer and freelance journalist. He is the author of three nonfiction books, including For Want of a Fir Tree: Ukraine Undone (Linda Leith Publishing, 2018) and Avant l’après: Voyages à Cuba avec George Orwell, winner of the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award. Later, this book was published by Talonbooks in English as Orwell in Cuba: How 1984 Came to Be Published in Castro’s Twilight. Lavoie continues his investigation of the many faces of humanity in troubled times. As a journalist, Lavoie has contributed to many Canadian and European media outlets, reporting from more than thirty countries. Previously based in Moscow and Chicago, he now divides his time between Montréal and Mumbai. Lavoie is currently writing a book on Bangladesh.

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FEBRUARY 14 TO MARCH 16, 2016

FIRST TRIP

A LEAKY BOAT

The almost-empty Air China Boeing 777 from Beijing with a stop in Montréal is starting its descent into Havana’s night sky. I think again of how improbable it must have seemed, on December 2, 1956, that the twenty-two survivors of a yacht’s botched landing and the subsequent battle on a beach more than eight hundred kilometres from the capital could in two years conquer the entire island and proclaim the triumph of their revolution. All it would have taken for the course of Cuban history to have been radically changed was for the expedition’s leader to have been killed, like sixty of his comrades, as he walked across the Las Coloradas beach, or that he die on one of the hundreds of other occasions when he ought to have perished before and after this fiasco. But he survived, on that occasion and others. And he is still surviving, against all odds, at eighty-nine-and-a-half years of age, despite his increasingly frail health. Unkillable, just like his revolution, which has been given up for dead as often as he has.

On the tarmac of José Martí Airport, an Eastern Air Lines airplane, an American flag painted on the side of its nose, is at rest between two flights. Early in 2016, air traffic between Florida and Cuba is limited to a few very expensive charter trips: between four and five hundred dollars, return, for an hour and a quarter in the air. For a year now, the American government has been allowing its citizens to travel to Cuba without having to obtain prior authorization. But they cannot go just as tourists. The purpose of their trip must fall into one of the twelve categories of approved exemptions: a family visit; educational, religious, or journalistic activities; a humanitarian project; a sports competition; scientific research; a professional meeting; and other justifications of the sort. In theory, if the Treasury Department learned that one of its citizens had spent the week on a Cuban beach sipping mojitos, it could still exact a penalty. In practice, no American has been punished since the swearing-in of Barack Obama in January 2009. Hundreds had been punished under his predecessor, George W. Bush. Given the price of tickets and the restrictions, many American tourists still prefer to travel through a third country such as Mexico, Canada, or Panama. The clientele of Eastern Air Lines is mainly made up of Americans of Cuban origin who are going to visit their families, and, above all, to bring them supplies. Which explains why, in the baggage pickup hall, dozens of enormous suitcases, electrical appliances, cartons of medicine, and other cardboard colossi wrapped in blue plastic block the way to the carousels.

When Miami lands in Havana, Terminal 2 is bedlam in spades.

*

During my first days in Cuba I stay with Armando, an artist in his thirties. During our online conversations, we’d agreed to barter. For every night I spend in his home he deducts fifteen convertible pesos (cuc) from the 150 or so he owes me for the boxes of photo paper, the acetate film, the fixer, and the developer I have brought from Canada. Thanks to our deal, he can now mount the photo exhibition he is planning without spending a cent on the materials, which are unfindable in Cuba. The arrangement also helps me save money. The Playa neighbourhood is out of the way, but it would have been hard to find a room at such a low price in Havana.

According to Cuban law, my staying with him is totally illegal. Aside from hotels, foreigners are only allowed to sleep in authorized casas particulares. The owners of those guest houses have to inform the authorities of the presence of new visitors on the day of their arrival, and to pay a tax on the rental of the room. Armando does neither.

During my stay he gives me his room and goes to sleep with a woman he met a couple of days before my arrival, on the Malecón, the wide promenade by the sea, the capital’s favourite spot for strolling, flirting, and prostitution. He leaves me in the good hands of his mother Sonia, a retired meteorologist.

During the period of friendship between the Cuban and Soviet people, Sonia studied at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Her Russian is rusty, but we manage to communicate. She also speaks English, and for several months has been studying French for her own pleasure at the Alliance française. Sonia was seven years old when the barbudos took power. Looking back on her middle-class childhood – her father was also a meteorologist – she recalls that under the old regime, the poor were really poor. The Revolution did away with these inequities, and introduced health and education systems that were free for all and sundry. Like many Cubans Sonia is very proud of those achievements and tries to do her part in bettering the Revolution. She is a member of the Communist Party, and regularly attends, along with her former colleagues, all the massive workers’ demonstrations. But these days she’s thinking of turning in her party card. The problem, she says, is that the Revolution has got bogged down in its ideals. Ideologically blinded, the Party and its leaders have made decisions that were certainly noble, but that turned out to be counterproductive. The young people get free education in Cuba, then go abroad to make money. We ought to make them stay here long enough to repay what they owe to our system, she says. The Revolution is a leaky boat.

The day after my arrival, Sonia tells me how to get around on Havana’s public transport. By the side of 31st Avenue, we hail the almendrones, the big almonds, the American cars from before the Revolution that serve as collective taxis. But at nine in the morning the competition is fierce. Several prospective passengers are mounting the avenue, hoping to be the first in line for the next free space heading to the old town. It’s pointless to try the guaguas. The public buses are full to bursting. At each stop, the doors close on the last bold passengers daring to embark despite the obvious lack of space. The more cautious and less aggressive are left behind on the road, hoping that the next guagua will be the good one. As for the taxis ruteros, the private buses twenty-five times as expensive as the public ones, they take on no waiting passengers, and all of them pass us by, already full.

After waiting forty-five minutes, we resign ourselves to giving up on the 31st, and continue our quest on the 41st. Lucky for us, in less than two minutes an empty almendron, just beginning its day, stops. The old wreck’s insides are full of anachronisms. Built into the dashboard is a mini-screen showing reggaetón videoclips. Stuck onto the glove compartment is a homemade sign informing clients that if they pay in convertible pesos, they’ll receive their money in Cuban pesos at a rate of one for twenty-four, instead of the official rate of one for twenty-five. The segregation that once existed between the cuc (pronounced cooc by some, say-oo-say by others), the tourist industry’s currency pegged to the American dollar, and the cup (coop), the moneda nacional in which the Cubans receive their salaries, has almost disappeared. The two currencies are exchanged with almost no distinction. As long as the government does not decide to do away with one or other of the currencies, the monetary bipolarity on the island serves only to confuse tourists and make it easier for them to be swindled. But I won’t be fooled. Neither on the conversion nor on the going rate. Alejandro has already filled me in on the colectivos’ pricing. Between Playa and Vieja, I’ll pass through the neighbourhoods of Vedado and Centro. The trip between the two costs ten Cuban pesos. For two neighbourhoods or more, it’s a maximum of twenty pesos. I do the calculation. If workers make a return trip between work and home each day in a collective taxi, and if the two are situated in adjacent neighbourhoods, and they earn the official average salary of 687 pesos per month, they will spend almost all their money just on transport. If they have no other source of revenue, they are condemned, like most people, to cramming themselves into the guaguas every morning for forty centavos per ride.

The car fills up quickly. The driver reminds every new client to go suave with the wonky door. How many times has this door been opened and closed over the last sixty years? How many times has it been mended? And how many more times will it open and close before the long-awaited economic transformation of the island or the lifting of the embargo allows it to be sent to its final resting place?

*

Armando and I are waiting in line before the offices of the state telecommunication company ETECSA. My first cola. After about half an hour, we’re asked to present ourselves at a window. I need a SIM card for my phone. To facilitate the process, Armando has offered to get it for me under his name. He presents his identity card. An unhelpful cycle in the washing machine has rendered it almost illegible. The information on it was inscribed by hand. The clerk makes a face. The document is not acceptable, she says. Too damaged. Armando tries to sweet talk her. If you’d accept it, he replies, I’d be very grateful. His charm, and especially his veiled promise of a recompense, have their effect. She agrees to go on with the procedure, not without warning him to get a new identity card for next time. I slip the money to Armando for him to pay. Forty convertible pesos, including ten for usage credits. At thirty cents for a minute of conversation and fifteen cents for sending an SMS, the cell rates in Cuba are among the highest in the world. Cubans with cellphones use them as little as possible.

The clerk gives Armando the change. He extracts three CUC coins and returns them to her with a smile, not even trying to disguise what he is doing. She drops them into a bribes jar under the counter, where they go to join other tokens of gratitude for bending the rules.

My first regalito. My first crack in the Revolution.

LITERATURE IS NOT DANGEROUS

He enters the café, spots me, comes over, takes his earphones out of his ears, letting them hang down between two shirt buttons, shakes my hand without looking me in the eye, without smiling, lifting his chin slightly as his only greeting, as if we were old friends who had just seen each other the day before. He sits down, declares that he doesn’t like coffee and won’t be drinking anything, then begins to talk.

In English his accent has certain British intonations that don’t entirely mask those of his Spanish mother tongue. His vocabulary is rich, that of a wide-ranging reader. To support his arguments, he cites from memory a host of authors. He makes occasional errors in grammar, but I only notice them because they’re different from mine in the same language. He talks and talks, passing from the trivial to the philosophical, from literature to women, from Cuba to Spain. Almost everything he says is interesting. But I have to interrupt him, or he’ll never stop and I’ll never know how he came to be the translator of the second Cuban edition of 1984.

Fabricio González Neira was born on February 6, 1973, in Havana. If I learned his identity before even holding a copy of the book in my hands, it was thanks to his excessive rigour.

Two weeks before my departure, doing research on the internet using key words – 1984 Orwell Cuba Arte y Literatura – I came across a translators’ forum in which a certain gabrielsyme73 stated that a Cuban publishing house had asked him to translate 1984. The message was dated March 11, 2015. The person behind the avatar was asking his colleagues to help him translate an expression used by Orwell in the third chapter of the novel’s first section. In this passage, Winston is imagining a Golden Country, far from the dark world in which he was living.

Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women’s hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.

What exactly did Orwell mean by saying that the old pasture was rabbit-bitten? Is it that the pasture ought to have been giving off light differently than another eaten by cows, horses, giraffes, or elephants? asked gabrielsyme73. For the translator, the problem dwelled in the fact that Orwell was not the sort of writer to be carried away by lyric descriptions only for their beauty. If he used an expression so precise, it must have had a meaning that was just as precise. Perhaps he was referring to a particularity of the English countryside with which a Cuban could not possibly be familiar? No responses offered by the other members of the forum were able to satisfy gabrielsyme73’s appetite for a deeper meaning to the phrase. To his great disappointment, he had to resign himself to the same literal translation that his predecessors had employed.

Era un campo viejo cuya hierba estaba mordida por conejos …

Barely a few hours after I sent a private message to gabrielsyme73 on the forum, Fabricio González replied. We embarked on a correspondence wherein he told me about his life. His beginnings: the only child of a Havana correspondent for the Spanish daily El Mundo and of an ex-bureaucrat for the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, long divorced. His current status: a bachelor living with his mother and a nameless cat. His years outside the island: eight in all, less than one in London and the rest in Spain. His tastes: Music, books, chocolate, and women. His convictions: from the religious point of view, an atheist; philosophically, a pessimist; and politically, a leftist, but not fanatic. And his current employ: as an English instructor for college teachers, an editor for the state publisher Letras Cubanas, and a freelance translator.

In his emails, Fabricio gave me advice on what to read, and offered to introduce me to people in Havana who, in his opinion, could provide me with insights on today’s Cuba. Before even waiting for me to express interest, he’d already contacted some of them.

Throughout our exchanges, I’d never posed the question that made me want to write him in the first place: How did he become the translator of 1984?

Now that I was face to face with him in the café on Obispo Street, I was able to ask.

So how did this all come about?

It all began in April 2014, with a call from the director of Arte y Literatura Editions. They were seeking a translator for 1984, and his name had come up. At first Fabricio told himself that someone must have had too much to drink the night before and would call the next day to withdraw this curious offer to translate an antitotalitarian literary classic. Still, he accepted. No one called him the following day. In fact, the second call came almost a year later, and its purpose was not to withdraw the project, but on the contrary to put pressure on him to complete it. Arte y Literatura was preparing its catalogue for the 2016 book fair, and wanted at all costs to include 1984. Now, since he had first been given this assignment, Fabricio had provided no update on the progress he was making. His silence was not hard to explain: during the year that had passed, he had barely touched the manuscript. Instead, he had been concentrating on contracts from Spain that were much more lucrative. Financially speaking, his procrastination made sense. For the hundreds of hours of work required to translate the 88,942 words of one of the landmark works of the twentieth century, he would receive only six thousand Cuban pesos, barely three hundred Canadian dollars. That was a decent amount of money in Cuba, the equivalent of ten or so months of salary in a publishing house, but it was still starvation wages compared to the smallest translation contracts Fabricio received from foreign sources.

A few months after the second call, Fabricio finally sent off the translation. It was given a rudimentary edit, a preface by a prominent historian was tacked on, the layout was hastily done, and it was dispatched to the printer.

Translating 1984 inevitably threw Fabricio back into Orwell’s world. Reading the novel for the first time in the early 1990s, he had been overwhelmed by its power. It was his friend José Miguel – who would later become one of the most prolific science-fiction writers on the island – who had passed him a copy. Back then, they had made a pact along with a third collaborator: whichever one of them was able to lay his hands on a book had to lend it to the two others before reading it. The cover of José Miguel’s copy of 1984 was hidden behind thick paper. In theory, it was not stated anywhere that the book was banned in Cuba. But everyone knew that any book that was not explicitly permitted by the regime was implicitly forbidden. Books being rare, it was common practice to cover them and protect them from wear. You could just as easily, in a park or on a bus, be reading a collection of Fidel’s speeches, a romantic novel, or a work that could be condemned as counter-revolutionary, without arousing any suspicions.

Rereading 1984 before embarking on the translation, Fabricio was much less impressed than during his adolescence. In the intervening time he had combed through the world’s great literary works, and many more obscure books. His eye had sharpened. Like many critics, Fabricio judged that 1984’s narrative line and its characters were not especially well-developed, and there was nothing in Orwell’s prose to impress a practised reader. On the other hand, he still admired the qualities that had made the book a classic. Orwell was extremely insightful when it came to many aspects of life under a dictatorship. That is why in translating him, Fabricio often asked himself whether those who had authorized the project had truly gauged the import of their decision. Political repression in the Castro brothers’ Cuba had certainly never approached the extremes of Big Brother’s Oceania, but every Cuban reader would certainly see parallels between the two societies. For example, in the passage where Orwell describes the generational gulf that separates Winston, thirty-nine years old, from his lover Julia, ten to fifteen years younger and born well after the revolution, Fabricio felt that in Julia’s attitude he could recognize his own generation.

She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched her own life … Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same … He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation, people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it as a rabbit dodges a dog.

Fabricio, like Julia, never embraced the Party’s ideals. Unlike the generation that preceded his, he never knew disillusionment. He has no intention of rebelling against the powers that be. He only wants to limit the Party’s influence on his life. To direct confrontation, he prefers serene disobedience, only breaking the rules he knows he can transgress without consequences.

In the café where we’re talking, when Fabricio mentions the Castro brothers, he takes no particular precautions. Rather than miming a beard to invoke Fidel or slanted eyes to mimic Raúl, as some more fearful Cubans still do today, he utters their names without even lowering his voice. He would not take to a microphone to express his contempt for them, but he does not shy away from criticizing them during a private conversation in a public space. He knows that indiscreet ears might be listening in. But in 2016, how many informers would still take the trouble to denounce someone who says out loud what the majority are thinking to themselves?

Fabricio believes that this state of apathy, as widespread among the regime’s supporters as its detractors, explains in part why the authorities thought it possible to authorize the publication of 1984. They’ve understood that literature is not dangerous, that a book won’t change anything. All the more so given that the Cubans who really wanted to read Orwell’s dystopia did so long ago. Like Fabricio, they’d been able to lay their hands on one of the clandestine copies in circulation, or had more recently accessed its pirated digital version, either online or on a USB drive. The virtualization of information has robbed the regime of its monopoly on the distribution of literature, in the past compromised only by a few books brought in from outside. Fabricio made that clear to me even before my leaving for Cuba. Thinking I was doing him a big favour, I’d proposed bringing to him from North America a book in English of his choosing. He replied that he already downloaded many more titles than he was able to read, but that, on the other hand, he’d be most grateful if I could buy him some chocolate, as he found the taste of what was produced in Cuba to be so to speak, naive.

Given all that, it was most improbable that the publication of a new version of 1984 would suddenly upset the established order and put the regime’s survival in jeopardy. But why risk publishing it, however small the threat, when one could easily not do so? Why have everyone asking why you’re bringing out this book at this time when all the queries could be avoided?

Why this rather than nothing?

Fabricio has no answer. He doesn’t know who initiated the publication or who authorized it. What he has been led to suspect, between the lines, is that the request came from a level higher than the publishing house. But how much farther up in the hierarchy? As high as the Cuban Book Institute, the Ministry of Culture, or even Raúl Castro? Fabricio is not the sort to be beguiled by facile scenarios. The Castro option seems very dubious to him. But beyond that, who knows?

He does, however, speculate that the authorities’ motivation was basically a pragmatic one. For a number of years, the Cuban Book Institute, which oversees most of the country’s publishing houses, has attributed a business status to some of them. That means that they continue to receive grants from the state, but that they must pay for certain operational expenses out of the revenue from their sales. Arte y Literatura is one of the companies that is now a business. Its print run for 1984 was seven thousand copies, which is huge for Cuba. They knew the book was going to sell, Fabricio concludes.

To summarize: according to this theory, the wide distribution, in a communist, single-party regime, of one of the antitotalitarian literary classics, would have been authorized in order to contribute to the financial well-being of one of the system’s institutions. If that were true, the irony would be enormous. But if one thinks about it, however cynical it seems, the theory holds water. If the regime felt that 1984 could become a bestseller without inspiring the book’s readers to rise up, why not take advantage of the opportunity? Why not itself slake their thirst for subversive reading material while pocketing the profits deriving from their gratification? After all, as the capitalists say, money has no smell.

*

Once I’ve finished my coffee, Fabricio and I take the guagua to San Carlos de la Cabaña. The fortress, built in the eighteenth century by Spanish colonizers, is the book fair’s main site every year. Under Batista, la Cabaña was a prison. During the Revolution’s first months, summary trials and executions of presumed counter-revolutionaries took place there, under Che Guevara’s supervision.

It’s very fitting to call this a fair. To reach the fortress’s entrance from the main street where the bus has left us, we have to walk a few hundred metres through a dense crowd massed in front of dozens of temporary food and amusement kiosks. Along the way, we can amuse ourselves with inflatable games or bounce on a trampoline, buy a hat, try a plate of roast chicken, ropa vieja, or hamburger, but there are no books in sight.

At three Cuban pesos, the entry